The Patriot Post® · Biden's Polling Woes: Worse and Worser

It takes a lot to get us jazzed up about a poll these days. Joe Biden, after all, seems to keep falling off the floor, plumbing new depths of voter dissatisfaction. But a new poll by Morning Consult Political Intelligence sheds fresh light on just how bad it’s getting for the president and his party.

“Perceptions of President Joe Biden’s job performance worsened across most of the country in the first quarter of this year,” reports Morning Consult, “deepening the challenges for his party in key states ahead of this year’s midterm elections that largely overlap with the 2024 presidential map.”

Just how deep are those “challenges”? Consider this: Joe Biden is now upside down in 40 of the 50 states — states that show more voters now disapproving than approving of his job performance. Or consider this: “Biden is underwater by double digits in 33 states, from conservative enclaves such as West Virginia and Wyoming, to battlegrounds that were pivotal to his 2020 victory, such as Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia.” (Don’t get us started on Biden’s “victory” in those battleground states.)

That big-picture decline tells only part of the story. Consider, too, that Biden’s net approval rating fell by 38 points among independents in Michigan, along with 33-point declines among indies in two other swing states, Georgia and Minnesota. Indies tend to decide close elections, especially in swing states. In addition, a party’s midterm fortunes tend to track closely with the popularity of their president, so these are deeply troubling numbers for Democrats.

But it’s not just Republicans and independents who are driving Biden’s decline. As Morning Consult notes, “More than half of Democratic voters ‘strongly’ approve of Biden’s performance in just one state — Wyoming — compared to 47 states in the first quarter of 2021.”

Joe Biden is five points upside down in deep-blue Oregon, for Pete’s sake, although here it’s hard to know what’s driving Democrats away. It could be Biden’s policies and performance, or it could be that Oregonians have finally had enough of antifa, which has been wrecking civic life in the state’s biggest city, Portland, ever since Biden’s election.

Biden is seven points in arrears in the reliably blue border state of New Mexico, which has a large Hispanic population. This no doubt reflects the exodus of Hispanics from the Democrat Party — an exodus that, if it bears out in the midterms, will likely also doom the party’s presidential fortunes in 2024. Democrats, by way of identity politics, have become a majority minority party. They’ve continued to hemorrhage white voters in recent decades, and they can’t afford to split the Hispanic vote with Republicans.

As for those 10 oddball states that still regard Biden more favorably than not, one of them — California — stands out. The Golden State’s residents inexplicably view the hapless Biden favorably by 19 points, which makes us wonder whether Californians are even paying attention. On the other side of the scale is Democrat Senator Joe Manchin’s West Virginia, where Biden is upside down by 50 points.

Heck, Biden is just four points positive in his home state of Delaware. That’s margin-of-error stuff.

Not even the notoriously ill-informed youth vote can stomach Scranton Joe any longer. As the lefties at Vox lament, “The decline has been worse among young people of color, and like the country in general, young Americans’ dissatisfaction with him is growing.”

All this is of course great news for the Republican Party, which has so far been wise enough not to take any of the rope with which Democrats are hanging themselves. But, as our Mark Alexander noted last week, “there are six months between now and the much-talked-about midterm elections, and a LOT can happen in those months.”

Indeed, a lot can happen. On the other hand, Joe Biden’s numbers could, conceivably, continue to tank. At this point, nothing seems beneath him.